Music meme: day 12 of 30
Jul. 4th, 2017 10:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livA song from your pre-teen yearsis a challenge for me, because I almost didn't listen to recorded music at all before I was in secondary school, and the only singing I did was in school or synagogue.
I'm probably not going to find online versions of the Jewish music I grew up with because the anglo-Reform tradition is very little recorded anywhere. I think this אין כאלהינו at least shares some musical ancestry with the one I used to get my Dad to sing to me when I was really tiny, because I liked the repetitive structure of the hymn,
There is none like our God, there is none like our Lord, there is none like our king, there is none like our saviour. I think this memory is from when we still lived in my first house ie when I was under five, and being an unmusical child from an unmusical family, I didn't have a clear idea that songs were supposed to be tuneful, I thought of them as like poems but with even more obvious rhythm.
And I'm certainly not going to find a recording of the children's musical my music teacher wrote based on our learning to read system. I remember being terribly impressed that the song about the 'round' letter Oscar Orange was in the musical form of a 'round'. So there must have been a smattering of nursery rhymes, I think we had one tape at least, plus the stuff you learn as part of early school acculturation. And the obvious children's hyms from a bit older.
When we visited my cousins in Australia when I was 7 or 8, we listened to songs from the children's TV show Feathers, fur or fins. I was fond of Please don't call me a koala bear because it's about taxonomical pedantry.
So I think the choice for this item in the meme is going to have to be I should be so lucky by Kylie Minogue. I reckon I was listening to this when I was 10 or 11, so just about pre-teen. A few years later some of my classmates put on a play with a character who was really obviously a parody of me and was so uncool she listened to Kylie and even... Mozart, and I remember being offended not that my classmates thought I was uncool – that was obvious – but that one of the greats of the European classical tradition was somehow being associated with some pop singer so ephemeral that it was a social faux pas to admit to still liking her three years I'd tried to listen to her stuff in an attempt to fit in.
Honestly my immediate pre-teen years in the late 80s were a pretty terrible time for easily accessible music, as they were for fashion, (wow, look at Kylie's hair and clothes in that video!) Well, for white music at least, I was peripherally aware of Michael Jackson's Bad which is just magisterial, but it was well outside my musical context. And the alt scene, especially rock, had plenty of good stuff going on, but that's only with hindsight, as a child at the time I was almost entirely unaware of rock music, and it was still considered somewhat taboo, not respectable.
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Date: 2017-07-04 09:58 am (UTC)I'm trying to remember when rap first crossed my radar too, which is a tricky one: there was some stuff played on children's TV, but unsurprisingly not NWA! The oft-manufactured pop-rap wave really started the next year though. Think I caught a little bit of acid house, but mostly in the way you dimly remember until you actually get a chance to go back and learn.
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Date: 2017-07-04 10:25 am (UTC)Rock music was loud noises, drugs and swearing. And since I didn't have a radio, nor ever set foot in a music shop, I didn't have any chance to listen to anything beyond what my equally sheltered, good-girl classmates smuggled in to school on their Walkmans. Which was pretty much the subset of chart pop considered roughly appropriate for girls. So for me personally it was well into the 90s before I actually listened to rock music for myself to discover that it was in fact just a different genre of music and not inherently dangerous.
Rap... I remember when we were in secondary school we used to troll teachers by submitting raps for our poetry assignments. But that was mid-90s already. I don't recall when rap arrived in my cultural background. When I was little, I don't think it was the subject of moral panics like rock was, it just wasn't on anyone's radar at all? It could be that the pop-rap stuff of the early 90s made the transition from mostly white pop to more rap influenced music not stand out very much, especially when I was barely paying attention to popular music at all. MC Hammer was popular among my peers but I couldn't date that exactly.
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Date: 2017-07-04 02:55 pm (UTC)It's quite possible nobody around you was picking up on gangsta rap until circa Gangsta's Paradise, in which case they were probably more scared of what the dance and rave scenes had been putting out anyway because of the whole combination of drugs and never deciding whether angry or happy makes for a scarier subculture?
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Date: 2017-07-04 11:48 am (UTC)piyut.org.ilappear in English if you like – the old site isn't as snazzy but is easier to navigate for a learner.(no subject)
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Date: 2017-07-04 12:01 pm (UTC)I've done this in G minor so you can play it on a recorder to see if it matches the tune you remember. It might not! But they're close enough that the one you did post reminded me of this one...
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Date: 2017-07-04 09:00 pm (UTC)